[opencms-dev] Thumbnail images

[Paul-Inge Flakstad]

Hi list

Just wanted to talk some basics! :) -I'm wondering how you handle your images, and in particular: your thumbnails.

I am of course aware of the native image scaling feature provided by OpenCms, but somewhere along the line we decided upon "more control" (which we later discovered can be translated to "more messy"). We implemented a routine that keeps thumbnail files in the VFS, in sub-folders of "imagegallery" folders. 

This is working OK..ish... -Editors sometimes forget to view the page they attached an image to before publishing. Whenever that happens, attemting to access the published page online will produce an error. (The thumbnail is created via the template, so no thumbnails of images for that page exists prior to the very first pageview.) Not to mention that there are a lot more files to handle.

So, although the idea sounded good at the time, I'm not satisfied with our current solution.

I have a couple of (obvious) choices:
1.) Greatly improve routines for thumbnail generation / publishing
2.) Fallback to using OpenCms' native image handling capabilities

Do any of you guys handle thumbnail / images in ways I haven't thought of? 

To those of you who are using OpenCms' parameter-based scaling for thumbnails: how is that working? -We had a lot of OOM exceptions when we used it, which is one reason we created the custom routines for thumbnail handling (we wanted more control over garbage collection).

Hope some of you are willing to share! :)

Cheers,
Paul